Man Versus Creature: a Johannes Cabal Fanfiction
by CynaraM
Summary: Cabal delivers a recalcitrant piece of property to an unusual buyer. I repressed my inner fangirl and made an effort at a real Howard pastiche for this one; it's as indistinguishable from one of his shorts as I can make it.


Summary:

Cabal delivers a recalcitrant piece of property to an unusual buyer. I repressed my inner fangirl and made an effort at a real Howard pastiche for this one; it's as indistinguishable from one of his shorts as I can make it.

Notes:

My first fan fiction; there just aren't enough Cabal stories in the world.

Chapter 1: In which Cabal loses something important

The necromancer slumped against a tree, his arm throbbing, and considered his options. His light was running down. He held one of his arms out awkwardly, as if it had been injured. He had misplaced his eldritch horror. He did not know how he would find it.

Earlier that evening he had crested a hill in the evening light and looked out at the forest that stood between him and tomorrow's rendezvous on the shore of the Atlantic.

Here he was. Nowhere. He chose a damp stump from the nonexistent range of options and sat, resting. He had travelled under the sun all afternoon and had refused to accommodate the weather conditions in his choice of hat, resulting in his pallid face being tentatively invaded by a hint of sunburn. The blush felt decidedly unwelcome and was planning a getaway as soon as possible.

The single train had dropped him off just after luncheon. He had cycled to the hills and made the rest of the journey by foot. He disliked leaving his laboratory, hated leaving his house, loathed the wilderness, and if rare alloys of metal could have been ordered from the grocer he would have been at home writing up his notes even then.

The setting sun touched his ash-blond hair and set his blue glasses glowing with a purple light. Johannes Cabal picked up the lantern he had just placed by his black boots; inside it, a black substance sloshed - no, heaved - within the little panes of glass.

He had removed the substance from a personal collection: an extraordinary one, even by Cabal's standards, belonging to a titled degenerate who had kept his prize objet in a bejewelled rune-carved safe. The runes could have been a recipe for degenerate tartare for all the good they would do in an emergency. The collector had money, not sense, and certainly he did not have the learning, experience, and type of borderline personality that it took to understand what the substance might be. For one thing it was, possibly, alive. It was, possibly, a creature, or perhaps a scrap of one, a corner of a monster, a handful of a servitor that had been created before humanity.

The acquisition had been easier than expected; an ancient text had revealed to the dilettante the mystic chant which granted insights when voiced under the last light of the full moon - but only if the ritual were to be done in mystic isolation, entirely swaddled in thick mystic veils to allow the Inner Eye to manifest. Cabal's laboratory was easily up to the challenge of churning out an ancient text before luncheon, and he was only too familiar with the claptrap of the occult. He had included lengthy and expensive purification rituals and an impressive-sounding chant. As long as Cabal could hear the dilettante quavering out the necromancer's grocery order in Sanskrit he could be tolerably sure of solitude.

Sitting on the stump he lifted the lantern, keeping it at arm's length. It was the nature of the creature to be nondescript - and dangerous, though it was unlikely this little scrap could do much harm. Likely it was mindless. Still, Cabal was a careful man and furthermore not a robe-wearing tentacle-bothering cultist. He wished he was rid of it already.

Without warning a pane of glass shattered. Cabal was fast, but even as he heard the sound a black aggregate of ropy pseudopods raced over the lantern, over his hand, and up his arm to his face. Blind, Cabal's other hand dove towards his large leather bag, fumbling with the buckles. In half a second the mass, now stringy with ropy little tentacles, had flattened over his face, filling his nose, sealing his mouth, and prodding at his eyes.

Until it flinched like a shaken pudding, contracted into itself, and flopped to the grass, pseudopods scrabbling at the fatty smear that Cabal had daubed on its surface. Cabal shuddered, spat, and addressed it severely in Neo-Hyperborean. Not that it could understand. At least he hoped it couldn't. Shaking glass off his sleeve, he cleaned his fingers with a handkerchief. The strength of a full-sized specimen was supposed to be hideous, but he had assumed the tiny creature would be unable to achieve enough leverage, even if it was sufficiently sentient. He considered that question resolved. He had hoped he wouldn't have to use that pellet. It was the only one he had.

The blob had stopped contorting aimlessly and was writhing its outer membrane in a way that seemed almost systematic. Cabal realised it was contracting the area affected by the mixture of unclean and arcane fats he had startled it with. The smeared area was palm-sized, then plum-sized, then dime-sized. Was this instinctive behaviour, or was it learning how to clean itself? Cabal absently opened his notebook and scribbled, fascinated. Shortly, the creature was almost entirely clean, leaving a fatty smear on the grass.

Recalled to business, he clapped the lantern over it, broken pane down, and held it in place. He put his face close to the glass and spoke in his light, clipped accent. "Listen to me. If you attempt to escape again, I will stop you. If you attempt to harm me again I will injure you. Provoke me and I will cause you pain. I would prefer not to - it might take time and ingenuity - but if I must, I will." The creature heaved. Most unsatisfying, intimidating something without a face.

On his safe-cracking expedition he had supplied himself with a pair of tongs and a specially prepared skull to contain the object, but he hadn't held out much hope for the approach (the literature was scant and incoherent), and in the end he had wadded it into a small leather case. It had been uncooperative when he tonged it in, but not nimble or purposeful.

The case's stitching had failed later at an inconvenient moment, and it had loosed itself inside his Gladstone bag, necessitating a new receptacle. He was starting to feel a grudging respect for the thing. Whether or not it possessed the full measure of the servitors' reputed intelligence, it obviously had some sentience, even guile. Its physical properties were impressive. Perhaps a scientist could learn the mechanism of the species' reputed shape-changing powers through the study of a relatively manageable specimen.

He took out his notebook and began a new page. He began to see how a series of experiments could test its strength, intelligence, comprehension; he began to wonder if this being could form organs, and if so, how that behaviour could be induced for study by a scientist. It would be an ideal specimen, presumably possessing many of the physical properties of the true creature, but small enough to be contained and experimented upon with relative safety. What if….

He frowned and removed his blue spectacles, tucking them inside his coat. More time had passed than he had realized while he was caught up in his thoughts; the light was fading. Better to secure the creature now and make camp ('camp' consisted of a tin for boiling water, a bedroll, and a laminated tarp).

Like a man with a mouse under a bucket, he angled the lantern up. Either he could coerce it into the bag, or failing that, he could stun it with a few sharp blows from the butt of his handgun.

Neither plan worked. The creature twisted right and left, eeled between Cabal's hands, and tumbled down the hill in an end over end flop, ungraceful but rapid. Cabal cursed and followed but couldn't match its speed without risking a broken ankle. As he avoided rocks, loose stones, and animal burrows, he watched it reach flat ground and marked where it entered the trees. Had it formed legs, or was it still bouncing and flopping? The sun had sunk beneath the horizon, and it was dark in the shadow of the hill. He tried to slow his descent and realized that his downhill speed had broken the rate consistent with safety, control, and a reasonable chance of stopping without injury. The trees stretched out their branches to embrace him.

Chapter 2: In which Cabal tests hypotheses

So. The ground, the dark, the injured arm.

After a minute's exploration he decided it was most likely sprained, not broken. He opened his bag and began to improvise a sling from a spare undershirt.

He was tempted to give up this entire deal as a bad job: or, better yet, find the thing and give himself the satisfaction of introducing it to a series of bullets (fully three-quarters of an inch in diameter) from the massive Webley. However. It had taken a great deal of research to determine that the electrum was necessary to the new apparatus. Therefore, he would find the creature and stick it in the Gladstone and sell it to whatever misguided ass wanted to dance around it in an Enochian nightie. And it would almost certainly not be studied by anyone, he realized with a hint of discomfort.

He could easily devise a trap, but what to bait it with? What did it want, besides, apparently, freedom? If it ate, he didn't know what. Without eyes, he didn't see why it should be attracted to light, and the same argument made sound and scent equally doubtful as lures, but it did seem to have some understanding of its surroundings. He wrapped himself in the sling and set to work.

First, he tried light; he shone his torch around the trees and lit a fire. He tried ground vibrations. He tried shouting. He accidentally tried the odour of human blood when he tripped in the dark, jarring his elbow badly and tearing his sleeve and his skin on a thorny bush. He tried shouting again, then bandaged the wound, a medium-sized cut that would require stitches once he had some proper light. He wrapped it, noting the brisk bloodflow, and set himself to think around the pain. All this dashing around in the undergrowth was costly in time, energy, and skin. He needed a proper plan.

Horst would have thought of something. Horst understood motivations, which had always been mysterious to Johannes. He would have been able to think of something that could have interested a blob in a verdammt forest in the middle of the Gott-verdammt night. If Cabal waited until morning to look, he would miss the handoff. He supposed he could try to summon a demon to do the job for him, but the time, risk, and expenditure of resources made that option unattractive, as it practically always did.

He would never understand the idiots who turned to devils for power, money, and sexual gratification. Anyone with a bare shred of sense could see that they could be acquired with less effort, danger, and pain by conventional means.

Yes, in theory they could summon a demon to tell the summoner the location of a buried treasure, grant him high office, and give him a peek at a person of his choice as he or she bathed. In practice, once one had bought, excavated, or stolen the appropriate books, found an alder tree that had never seen moonlight, made a rod from its seventh branch (and spent several weeks finding out how one counted), cut it with a copper blade, shod it with silver, quenched the red-hot metalwork in lark's blood (and you try laying your hands on enough live larks to produce enough blood to quench anything) and then made sure that a virgin's shadow never fell upon it, they might as well have gone into politics and hired harlots.

There was no point unless you needed something singular. Something that could not be bought or lied for or tricked out of any human being.

In actuality, the summoning could be quite simple, but you couldn't tell the occultists that. They were devoted to the recipes and incantations set out by beard-engulfed simpletons who thought that lead could be turned to gold and devils cared what you called them. Still, summoning was time-consuming and dangerous. Whether in the laboratory or in Hell, you couldn't get something for nothing.

Cabal frowned. Something tiny and multi-legged had crawled inside his collar. It was another encouragement to finish this business and get out. He flung his hat to the forest floor and dug into his supplies.

He tried necromancy. To the hammer, he thought grimly, all problems look like a nail, but it could work. The creatures had been created by advanced science and magic, and the energies of resurrection might attract the thing. First, Cabal raised a large moth that had fluttered too close to the torch (picky work) and discovered that whatever batch 317 did, it did not make moths better fliers. Larger animals were confined to their burrows, but he was able to pick off a small owl with the Webley. There wasn't a great deal of it left, but enough to establish that 317 didn't improve owl flight, either. Nor did the arcane process attract the creature.

Cabal was tired, in pain, filthy, and increasingly concerned that a handful of black ick could hide from him indefinitely in this forest; that it had, in fact, already cleared the border and was making for the outer Hebrides even now. He was not sure he would be able to make the tradeoff and get the electrum; it would be a setback for his work. However… if he could find the thing, perhaps the rendezvous could be rescheduled somewhere on a major suburban train line. And - the idea flitted through his brain, just barely there - if the buyer no longer wanted it, perhaps Cabal would keep it for study.

He sat up sharply. Was that what he wanted? Could that be why he had been making such an almighty hash of this? He narrowed his eyes and began a rigorous cross-examination of himself. He found reluctance. He was reluctant to hand over the creature. The prisoner was guilty.

Cabal had thought he was beyond being shocked. He had faced death and soullessness and assorted horrors. He had made contracts with evil. He had stared into faces whose fundamental wrongness had fractured lesser minds. He had outwitted the most dangerous entity of which he knew (he thought carefully, not naming it even silently). But more than that, he had never grudged any sacrifice that added to his knowledge and furthered his goal. Family, society, reputation, safety, even the passing years had been offered up gladly. This, however, was the call of pure research, and he could not delude himself that anything he learned was likely to be of use to his project. It was the temptation of knowledge for its own sake and the thrill of discovery. Science was his method, not his metier, he reminded himself. Paltry. Nothing, next to his goal. The creature would have to go.

He dismissed the unsettling weakness for now and reapplied himself to the task at hand. He would rig a baited trap while developing a better idea. With no idea of what would tempt the creature, he combined everything. Owl blood, some of the creature's own slime from the interior of the leather case, a tea biscuit, a rock warmed by Cabal's small fire. The Gladstone bag was emptied and rigged, open, to fall on the bait if the triggering sticks were disturbed.

He composed his mind and considered the details of the doomed expedition that was one of the few human sources for the creatures' behaviour. Unfortunately, it had been written by a geologist. Cabal waited. His arm kept him conscious, and he attempted to recall details of the adults' habits and preferences. Amphibious. Strong. Intelligent, wily even. Unforgiving. Given to popping off the heads of their alien masters, in demonstration of points two, three, and four. Cave-dwelling, when on land. Slimy, he remembered, and his mouth watered unpleasantly at the recollection. Strange, piping call. More given to crushing interlopers under their giant bulk than diplomacy. There was a reason they hadn't been kept domestically this side of the last ice age.

Chapter 3: In which Cabal is assaulted

The night passed with Cabal swapping out warm rocks. No better plan presented itself and no creature appeared. The darkness was beginning to lift, and the buyer would be here soon. He would need to start his search, fanning out from the point where the creature had entered the woods yesterday evening. He stood, staggering a little from the blood loss and two sleepless nights. He propped himself against a tree until he could clearly discern up from down and the haze retreated from his vision.

He dusted and brushed his coat and pants thoroughly, though without as much effect as he would have liked, and carefully bent down to retrieve his hat. He was so fatigued that he did not register the odd heaviness of the article until he had clapped it on his head; a black curtain descended over his vision and a stifling skin over his nose and mouth.

Marvellous. He had found it. No pellet of unclean fats, no plan, no time, and not nearly enough blood in his brain. Adrenaline replaced it. Scrabbling at its corners was proving unproductive, though he couldn't quite convince his hands to stop. He supposed he might be able to fire a bullet through his cheek and out his mouth, puncturing the creature at least once in the process, but he wasn't sure that would inconvenience it and there was a good chance he would hit something he couldn't afford to lose. Owl blood, test batch 317, lantern glass, tongs, surely something could save him. The creature flexed, the pseudopods digging into his scalp and jaw, as if it were trying to pull his skin off his skull. Its tensile strength was terrific, and although it was not troubling with any of the invasive prods into his mouth or nose the taste was foul, and he had to divert a shred of attention to not vomiting and compounding the asphyxia with choking.

There were red spots behind his eyelids. Was it braced for pressure from within? He pushed at it with the air from his lungs, working his face and trying to create a small channel into which he could get a finger. The creature's seal held.

Scrabbling through the litter of the forest floor to find his roll of tools, kneeling on the tongs as he went, he extracted a scalpel. He slashed and sawed at the rubbery skin over his mouth. A slit! It healed almost immediately, but he repeated it to get a fresh breath of air. Impasse. He could keep cutting a breathing-hole, but the creature could heal it as quickly. Whose strength would give out first? It would be a dreadful death: the gasps of air in the dark; the weakening hands; the final dull submission to the enemy.

The forest glade contained a strange figure; a suit-clad man on his hands and knees, surrounded by medical tools, small cases, and papers. He had a glossy black skin slicked over his face, and in one hand he clutched a scalpel. There was a dogged set to his shoulders as he slashed a breathing-hole for himself, again and again. He paused for a moment.

His head snapped up, and his movements held a new energy. Again, he raised the scalpel to his mouth and sliced through the creature's skin to make a breathing hole. His other hand darted to the new edge and held it firmly between finger and thumb; in the same movement, the scalpel carved into the creature and severed away the piece held in Cabal's fingers. He threw it to the ground.

A bizarre buzzing sensation transmitted itself to Cabal's skin as the thing vibrated and, for the second time that day, wrenched itself from his face, plucking at eyebrows, eyelashes, eyelids, before it fell to the ground. He found the Gladstone bag through his watering eyes, flung both pieces of creature inside and buckled it tightly before being thoroughly sick.

Chapter 4: In which a delivery is made

He sat down to await his buyer's arrival in the dim grey light. He was impatient enough to pace, but his exhaustion kept it in check. He had expected a boat, but he could hear nothing through the mist. He had the Webley in his pocket. He waited.

Off to his left he heard a hissing sound, like rain on water.

"Finally. Let's get this finished." His authoritative cry fell dead, muffled by the fog. He stepped towards the sound but could see nothing. Closer, he found a thousand minnows flinging themselves out of the waves and on to the pebbles. The hissing of tiny bodies breaking the surface and falling back in became a deeper churning, and he saw that they had been joined by eels and larger fish which hurled themselves out of the water as if maddened. He stepped back smartly until he was standing on the straggly grass. A) it was very likely to be related to his 'buyer', B) that did not necessarily mean he was safe: hence the ugly Webley Boxer top-break revolver in his pocket. It was possible that the unknown party disturbing the fish would take one look at him and decide that killing one slender necromancer was preferable to parting with twelve ingots of electrum stamped with the sigils of repugnant kings.

The waters calmed. Fish flopped and eels ribboned on the beach, dying.

Fifty feet from shore a dome five feet in width rippled the surface of the water. The predawn murk barely showed the sheets of seawater sloughing off. Its blackness was indistinguishable from the ocean, but it was unmistakably a separate thing, apparently surfacing. Ten feet in width. Fifteen, and it stood ten feet out of the water. Its sides were smooth, but there was a suggestion of flabbiness, of terrible flexibility in the texture. It was moving ashore now, apparently rolling along the gentle shelving of the ocean floor up to the beach. Its shape remained unchanged, but he could see the slow tumble of its massive flanks, now mostly exposed: twenty feet in diameter at the base, a smooth swell of utter blackness. It was so astounding he had forgotten to run. Closer, he could see green lights flickering in its depths and a small expert flexing at the base of the hide that flicked the beach detritus from its smooth bulk as it rolled with an agility terrifying in a creature of such weight. Yes, a creature. The flexing was familiar.

This was not the buyer he had expected. This was not a nervous little man with a skiff from a transport ship offshore. This was not a sneering overdressed idiot with a penchant for dramatic and inaccessible exchange points. This was not even a demon, whose rules he could understand. This was impossible. It had stopped perhaps thirty feet away. Running would be pointless. The Webley was laughable. He gathered himself. "Welcome. Shall we exchange our… goods?" Would it be offended at the commoditization of its prize? If Cabal's survival was to be decided on the basis of his diplomatic skills, he should make a survival plan. He held up the Gladstone bag.

Bizarrely, an oblong shape pressed out of the mass. It projected further and proved to be a narrow case, supported by a series of muscular-looking tentacles. Cabal spent three seconds and ten years' emotional control suppressing a giggle. Best not to giggle. It seemed the monster was here to deal.

It set the case on the pebbles. Cabal hesitated. He was unsure what would happen if he opened the bag. He would prefer not to lose his merchandise now and have to hare down the beach after it as the black hulk watched quizzically (where were its eyes?). Ah. There were its eyes. Some of them, in any case, bubbling up to the surface, looking like blisters filled with green light. "Shall I release it?" A pseudopod extended itself at ground level, looking oddly like the beckoning hand of a dog owner. Cabal took that for assent.

He briefly considered flinging the Gladstone at it and running in the opposite direction, but he discarded the idea as lacking dignity and wasting his favourite bag. He opened the latch and poured the small thing on to the beach. It plopped out on to the pebbles, (in one piece now, he noted with fervent relief).

The hulk mewed from some unseen orifice, sending a shudder of revulsion through him. The fist-sized blob firmed up into a tighter shape and seemed to take its bearings. Fixing somehow on the monster, it rolled towards it, picking up speed until it was spinning across the mist-slick beach to the larger mass. When it reached the pseudopod, it flowed seamlessly into the larger creature, uniting completely and immediately. The hide where it had - attached itself? flowed in? - flicked the sand and scraps of seaweed that had clung to the newcomer away and was as glossy black as the whole. The surface shivered once and the creature began a slow roll down the beach into the water.

Cabal watched it go and waited. Its departure was again marked by frantically jumping fish, but the thrashing soon stilled and the beach was silent. He walked to the case, opened it, and confirmed that the ingots were within.

As he retraced his steps back to his bicycle, he thought. He thought about science and pure research and the fascination and hideousness of the unknown. He thought about a horror's long quest to reclaim something of its own, and the strange bargains it must have made to locate and acquire the thing through mortal proxies, and the final, seamless reconnection on the beach. Back home, he used his notes on shoggoth physiology to start his fire that night.


End file.
